Python in Astronomy, Day 3
The day started with contributed talks by Adam Ginsberg (astroquery), Victor Terron (LEMON), and Arjen van Elteren AMUSE). These three different packages do quite different things: query remote archives, automate differential photometry, and glue different pieces of astronomy software together. During the last talk there was an interesting Twitter discussion of why astronomers call their packages-of-software “codes”.
After coffee: Britton Smith of Edinburgh gave an overview of the yt project. As it says on the webpage, “[the] yt project aims to produce an integrated science environment for collaboratively asking and answering astrophysical questions.” Storify here.
Finally lightning talks, Storified here.
Afternoon unconferences, session one:
- yt tutorial (B. Smith)
- astroquery tutorial (A. Ginsberg)
- astropython.org reboot (T. Aldcroft, notes here)
- credit for software development (E. Tollerud, tag #pyastrocred, notes here).
I was at this last session and it spawned a quite interesting Twitter discussion which I will blog separately later, but if you can’t wait, it starts here and continues here.
Afternoon unconferences, session two:
- Ginga visualization (E. Jeschke)
- Photometry in python (M Craig, tag #pyastrophot, notes here)
- Intro to Python packaging (E. Bray, slides here)
Afternoon unconferences, session three:
- Performance tutorial (M. Droettboom, slides here)
- Pycharm tutorial (M. Metchley)
- Making documentation easy to write (S. Mumford, notes here)
- New reprojection module (T. Robitaille, see this repo)
We sang happy birthday again, for two participants this time! Hopefully most of us are better programmers than singers. Finally the conference dinner, which was great fun and featured ice cream with sparklers in it for dessert. As far as I know, no one’s hair was lit on fire. Pleased to report that I cycled back to the hotel afterwards, in the dark and wearing a skirt, and did not fall in any canals.